Week13 final assessment

Work done thus far:

Over the past semester we have been creating ourselves a web presence. We have explored the possibilities and other features of google, besides using it as a web seach engine. Then created these blogs and looked at html. After this we looked at flikr and delicious, creating accouts with these. We also looked at templates and how to custumise our blogs, created our athene sites using iweb, looked at counters and RSS along with technorati. Without doing this subject I wouldnt have been aware of all the processes involved in creating all these things and seeing how they work, and just little things like html and counters, I never even knew they existed.

Google-
Here is what I learnt about that week:
Gmail-I liked the sound of Gmail as it was being explained. All the features that it has and the 'online presence', being able to log in anywhere and still have access to all your documents and files. This can be very useful when working as you can do it by distance, eg living in Sydney and working with people in Wagga. The process of creating the account was a bit annoying though, I had to type in my password several times and try to workout what the weird verification letters were.

Google-Overall I find the Google search engine a great way to find information, when you type in a search there are numerousoptions that supply you with information about your topic. However, this can also be quite frustrating though, as you have to select an option that is actually relevant from the thousands that arise. This can be very time consuming and there are so many irrelevant options that come up.

Other products-There are so many other options and products that google has available to use for various occasions, and uses. Some including, maps, directories, groups, Docs, groups, toolbars, note book etc. All of these open upa huge range of new things that can be achieved for the user. I do find that in some cases there can be a bit of an information overload though. There are so many links, graphics, advertising from unrelated sites, these tend to distract from what the user initially had intended to do.


Blogger and html-
This week I learnt how to created a blog, what they could be used for and how to use them. There are still many features that I am yet to explore eg all the dfferent gadgets that are available to use. Since creating it, I have added a photo slide show, put an "about me" links to uploads from my delicious and flikr accounts, changed the look of my blog, the colour and header. When looking at html I learnt about how to make links using the -a href code, also how html can be used to create and customise webites and pages.

Flikr
This week I created my flikr account. I have found it very interesting. Its a great way to keep all your photos together online so you can have access to them where ever you go, provided you have a computer handy. I learnt how to create sets so you can better organsise all your photos and how to join groups and add contacts. Its a great way to share your own images with other people also as they can access your photo post stream. Since I created my account Ive uploaded photos into 8sets with about of 54 photos and videos in total.


Delicious
Delicious is a website for saving and sharing book marks. Like flikr, delicious is online so you can access it where ever you go. I now have about 40 book marks in total, some of which ar eof class mates blogs and others are sites that I find interesting such as some about "poi" or fire spinning and drawing and photoshop techniques.

Templates
WHen looking at templates I found that it is a fairly easy way of changing the look of your blog. The layout of your blog can be changed, along with the background and the font styles and colours. However I also learnt that you cannot change the content of you blog this way.

Athene websites
For this week I learnt about how to create my athene website using the aid of iweb and fetch. I made my pages on whats called a domain file which is then "published to a folder" consisting of a site file and a folder containing information about the domain pages. These are then dragged into the poublic folder on fetch, and the athene account is refreshed, which allows every one to have acces to it.

Counters RSS
On both my blog and my website I added RSS feeds and counters also making a google reader account. I learnt how RSS feeds allow you to get updates websites without you having to look them up all the time, you can just subscribe to them and store them in google reader. I also learnt about the process of generating the javascripts by getting the RSS feeds from websites.

Technorati
I made a technorati account also. It allows you to search for other blogs on the internet (see this weeks pot for more detail of it application). Like the proccess of making all the other accounts for flikr etc. this was a bit of an annoying process. Getting a user name and password that was acceptable and then making sure all of the right boxes were ticked, then waiting for the site to acctually work...any way I got it in the end.